Raymond's Newbie Thoughts

[Propfam 2,288]

8 minutes ago, AsimPika3172 said:

Cool! 😎

Same!

[rivit 3,391]

Thanks for those files Ray. I've been able to prove that GoFSH (with the fix) works to make the Grey256 files and that they work with your exemplar. I've also been able to prove that the Group, and the variable contents of the header make no difference. They also helped me fix a format I had no examples for.

Mucking about with it - I note its really sensitive to the Strength values and the Contrast in the images - bigger contrast more bang for your mouse click - so they are tricky to tune. Also I note that they are not independently directional - so if you rotate the map the brush rotates with it.

I'll have a new GoFSH soon - I was in the middle of testing it so I'm still making sure I haven't broken it because its had a pretty generous going over for performance improvements over the last few weeks - its winter so outside isn't always that attractive, and now we are in lockdown again. Good for some things.

[City_Slider 2,716]

Leck mich fett :-D

Good Job Ray... you are an Artist!

- Oliver

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

On 7/1/2021 at 6:48 PM, Whte_rbt said:

I know you asked BartonThinks specifically but yes, I could use a square tree brush. It would make filling in 'Central Park' type builds so much easier.

The number of times I've had to demolish roads/buildings because of one errant tree placed by the circular tools....

Thank you @Whte_rbt, Got it, I have tested flora brush, though it's a bit different with others, whereas I have controlled the scope precisely.

@rivit Just take your time rivit, Indeed I need more tests to figure out the relation between strength (height) and grey scale, a bit difficult though, I thought when you finish your work, You are the best one to complete Wikipedia about these new formats.

@City_Slider Not an artist, Oliver, Just a machine.

I catched a little cold these days, so not too much progress with researching, But I have figured out a method in 3ds max that generates elevation map with any model.

Besides, I found that one of Comp1OperationID (dimly remembered it's 7 or A) can change the Terrain's texture to a black texture, or maybe a decal, it's hard to describe it, but this value hasn't been used by Maxis, don't know what's the function of it, and it disappeared after re-enter the map just as rain tool. so I plan to test other values which haven't been there in existd Exemplars.

Hiya @Terring, An off-topic question, Do you know a place in Greece which name probably is 'theraompa?', It doesn't look like English, when browsing in Google map, I came across a church in this place and Suddenly I entered that church, Wow, The Google map's street view even can go inside a building, I just know it,  But I lost this position when I wanted to enjoy it again. I still want to have a look of a slope trail with stairs there, and it seems that place isn't far away from the sea. Thank you in advance.

[Propfam 2,288]

Nice patterns! Keep up!

[City_Slider 2,716]

Do i see the Head of an Eagle?

[City_Slider 2,716]

Is it possible to send it or upload this Map Ray?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

1 hour ago, City_Slider said:

Is it possible to send it or upload this Map Ray?

I think it's possible, Oliver, They're just Terrain Brushes,  I need to tidy them up a bit, then share with you here. 

Frankly, I don't think these Brushes are much useful to our Terrain formatting works, They just look interesting and I made them for testing and researching. I thought to make some basic shapes are more better, such as Straight or Diagonal lines or circle or square etc, these would be more helpful to regulate the Terrain as we wish precisely.

Besides, I'd like to share all I got in a dedicated thread after Rivit's work so that more peeps are involved, since my own ability is inadequate, then people can make their Brush with personal patterns. and I thought there are supposed to be more possibilities in Brush's Modding.

Something happens is just like…how to say, mean to be? @CorinaMarie just taught me the meaning of DEM(Digital Elevation Model), Then I came across this, Such a coincidence!

[City_Slider 2,716]

8 minutes ago, Raymond7cn said:

Then I came across this, Such a coincidence

Let us know/see :-P

[Propfam 2,288]

I just want this to be developed further that we don't need SC4TF for at least, 95% of cases, with the obvious exception of SC4M import/exportation, but we can use SC4Mapper for that. Imagine WYSIWYG harbor tool in game. That'd be nice.

[Wiimeiser 444]

Terraformer would still be useful for making full regions. What this would do, though, is make it so that you don't have to make your whole port in Terraformer in advance, which is something I can definitely get behind.

[Terring 6,473]

Those new brushes looks amazing. They would lift off terraforming

22 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Do you know a place in Greece which name probably is 'theraompa?'

Sadly I can't find a place with a name like that.

[Barroco Hispano 26,695]

We need a dune brush.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

8 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

I thought to make some basic shapes are more better, such as Straight or Diagonal lines

Never thought of that. A diagonal edge brush for flora would be real handy too.

[mattb325 28,880]

This is really great work, Raymond - the idea of creating sand dunes along beach edges or a straight/diagonal lines for flora placement would be extraordinarily handy.

It's an excellent discovery that you've made 

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

On 7/3/2021 at 1:52 PM, Raymond7cn said:

Hiya @Terring, An off-topic question, Do you know a place in Greece which name probably is 'theraompa?',

 

5 hours ago, Terring said:

 

Sadly I can't find a place with a name like that.

Thermopylae, Greece. It was the site of 2 famous battles, thousands of years apart. Spartans and Persians and in WW2.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

@SIM-ple Jack @Terring Thank you Jack and Terring, It's not Thermopylae, but never mind, I will ask you when I recall more clues.

@City_Slider @chfzdn @Wiimeiser @Barroco Hispano @mattb325 @Whte_rbt Thank you so much for your encouraging words and ideas, Yes the dune brush would be very awsome! Frankly, I really feel inadequate to finish this work just by myself especially when digging more deeper.

When I set the texture to One pixel width(one column), then the brush form the Terrain with a line (not a tile), when I set it to just a pixel, it raised just one point of a tile, Then I couldn't understand the angle of this one below (Does that mean the minimum in game is a point not a tile?):

This tunnel is like a Trapping, Haha.

Doesn't it look like some moat of a castle if it fills with water.

And also the most exciting part, I found that there are two properties which have never been used by Maxis, Comp1OperationID = 3 and Comp1DecalTextureID, At the beginning, I couldn't get them work separately, then I had a wild thought to use both of them together:

@CorinaMarie @Cyclone Boom

Hiya @matias93, I think this is probably another decal Andrew mentioned, 

Now my head is a mess,  so many possibilities by mixing those values and properties, (hex, grey scale, height, strength, brush's width, shift+brush, shift+1~7, Comp1+~Comp4....), Maybe Maxis put Terrain Brush on hold during developing? otherwise I couldn't understand why so many Brushes and properties and values were left there, why the rain and spring and some decals couldn't be saved after quitting the city. Anyway, I probably need huge help of you for further researching.

[Propfam 2,288]

1 hour ago, Raymond7cn said:

Doesn't it look like some moat of a castle if it fills with water.

Nice contraption to separate the peasants from the ruling class. Also, mountain bridges?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

1 hour ago, chfzdn said:

mountain bridges?

@chfzdn. This Plugins only has NAM within, so I thought those were NAM's features, I mean Road's foundation or can build bridge without sea. Sorry that maybe I'm wrong due to lack of playing experience.

[Whte_rbt 1,431]

3 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

(Does that mean the minimum in game is a point not a tile?)

As far as I can remember, yes. Certain terrain tools work best on one specific corner of a tile (can't remember which, maybe NW corner?)

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Thank you @Whte_rbt, You're right, Now I'm more likely to believe this game's Terrain is a 3d graphic program.

I wanted to give the dune brush a try, It's not too hard to make it in 3ds max,

But when I put it into the game:

so it seems a bit difficult to achieve this due to the limitation on pixel, I need to figure out another way someday.

However, I found that Erosion brush is kind of special, (again) It includes two Comps, The first one's OperationID = 6 and without TextureID? another one's OperationID = 2 and with a Texture same as the soften brush, so I assumed 6 is erosion and deleted another one, 

Now, at least I have understood what a erosion brush is, when the ground is flat, it does nothing there, when it hit some area higher than the sea level, it will erode them by some random lines but leaves some traces there finally, Besides, I have also tried to add Textures and other properties, but they all didn't work with erosion, Anyway, after deleted the soften function it kind looks like a dune texture in a way.

Today I saw a post by @Barroco Hispano, There was a shadow texture id in lighting's Exemplar, Suddenly, I wanted to have a look at it,

It's a very little FSH, (probably 16x16), But weird thing happened again,

Everytime when I open it, its appearance changed in Reader, (I have tried three versions of Reader) and also I couldn't connect this picture with shadow in game. here is hex code:

I don't know, But I presume that the game may invoke some pixel's color or hex value when generating shadow map, you can tell there are still some properties : shadow color (0.08,0.06,0.23) and threshold, I'd like to modify this texture with @rivit's new GOFsh a try someday. Thank you again, Rivit!

[City_Slider 2,716]

Well... interesting... but im much to blonde, to understand it 

Go ahead Ray... you doing a great Job.

 

BTW... whats about the "Eagle" ?

[SIM-ple Jack 17,444]

Ray, load this into Mapper. It may give you more answers on pixels. I believe 4 pixels = 1 tile.

[City_Slider 2,716]

3 minutes ago, SIM-ple Jack said:

I believe 4 pixels = 1 tile.

Isn´t it 9vs 1? 3x 3

[Barroco Hispano 26,695]

You can change the color of the shadows or make them darker (It is something that can be seen in all the images I post.).

My parameters 

Maxis:

By the way, I don't understand why the maxis shadows are not in the correct position .

You can also have sc4 correctly use the alpha channel (Shadow threshold) to generate the shadows but that causes a "trasparent" halo to be seen when two shadows get in the way. 

 

[rivit 3,391]

The shadow texture is just a small overlay texture (DXT3), with identical color and alpha - shades of gray - the alpha has been quantized to 16 values. I think it gets used as a thresholded blur on the projection of an object as we would see it on the ground, then coloured in to a shade of blue. So imagine I shine a torch on the object from where I sit, then around the edges the shape of the object's shadow is defined where it hits the ground, and that turned into a flat semi transparent bluish mesh just above the ground. 

If you look at vehicles moving on the streets at very high zoom (like cheat sizeof 7) you can see this projection (say of trees) just above the roadway at say .2m and the wheels of the vehicles drive through it. Now for BATs etc often the shadow is baked into the model and extended by the projection outside the bounds of the BAT -  these don't always align.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ray I think part of the problem with the terrain brush as you've used it is that you're using it as one texture on an entire terrain  - so there's a question of scale involved. To add sand dunes to an entire map in your scenario would require a brush that has many dunes on it, each of a lot smaller amplitude/height and/or also really dailing down the strength of the brush so that you end up with dunes proportionate of the scale of the map.  So the mayor's mode brush of the dune in the smallest size would just add a blob of dune here and there as you go, and eventually you have a field() of sand dunes.

~~~~

I imagine the smoothing brush as taking a pixel and comparing it to the average of all pixels under the brush and if it deviates making it move closer to the average by some factor.

[Propfam 2,288]

Things getting weirder and weirder. Hopefully we'll see the light of the tunnel.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Thank you my friends!

@SIM-ple Jack Thank you, Jack, You're right about 4 pixels = 1 tile. however it's a bit different in Brush, since there are also a width property and the method we can adjust the scope of Brushes they work with grey scale texture together, more interesting thing is that sometimes the Brush only appeared on Ctrl+2,4,6 Brushes but disappeared on Ctrl+1,3,5 Brushes.

@Barroco Hispano @rivit I played with lighting Exemplar a bit today, 

Since @mattb325 has taught me about Sun Direction and pitch, so at the beginning, I made some tests with Shadow Texture ID, I missed its description (Flora's Shadow) yesterday where says:

In short, I think this texture doesn't take effect by Maxis, I deleted it, offset or editted some hex values, changed the color, modified other properties, however whatever I did, I couldn't see any difference there. weird!

As for other properties, I have understood some of them by testing:

Use Environment Map = False (default is True)

You can tell that after turned it to False, some areas of the Terrain where couldn't be shined by the sun became to totally dark, Does it look like a scene without GI or FG in 3ds max?  @Barroco Hispano

Shadow Color

17 hours ago, rivit said:

coloured in to a shade of blue.

Just as Rivit metioned, the default color of Shadow is dark blue, (I thought it was black before), If you multiply those numbers (RGB) by 255, you can see the color easily in Photoshop. so I set it to 1,0,0 (red):

Shadow Strength and Threshold

These two properties just increase the saturation, when I set them to 1: 

Too bad, You can tell that some details were lost such as the shadow of power pole. 

Besides, I have also tested Shadow size and Nighttime and Daytime Global Color, but to no avail, I couldn't see any difference there.

17 hours ago, rivit said:

Ray I think part of the problem with the terrain brush as you've used it is that you're using it as one texture on an entire terrain  - so there's a question of scale involved. To add sand dunes to an entire map in your scenario would require a brush that has many dunes on it, each of a lot smaller amplitude/height and/or also really dailing down the strength of the brush so that you end up with dunes proportionate of the scale of the map.  So the mayor's mode brush of the dune in the smallest size would just add a blob of dune here and there as you go, and eventually you have a field() of sand dunes

Rivit, You should remind me of this wrong direction I made more earlier,  Yes, I see, you're absolutely right, I will try your method soon. and Thank you for your rapid updating of GoFSH, I have tested it for about 20 textures and it worked perfectly. 

Hiya Oliver @City_Slider, 

When I was preparing to send those Brushes, I found an issue about its indicator, It's that green circle which is growing and shrinking when we hold the button of mouse, as you know I wanted it to be the shape same as my textures for a precise forming, But there wasn't such properties in LevelBrush's Exemplar at the very beginning, After some tests, I found out two FSHs, they are the textures of God and Mayor's Brushes, and as you know, The Mayor Brush's indicator is still there and without growing and shrinking, so I added two properties and pointted to the effects (Effdir section 14) which invoke the mayor's texture, then modified the texture.

But I found that my modifying also had influence on Mayor's Brush and others, such as the hospital or fire station's indicators, well, Anyway, I finally have narrowed down the influence in the scope of God's Brushes, But I have to make more tests tomorrow, In theory I guess that I could achieve it by modifying Effdir, But I haven't been able to do that.

If you don't mind it, I will send you these Brushes tomorrow (with default indicator), but you probably have to use them separately and remove them from Plugins after you don't need them, Anyway, I think we'd better do that through PM.

[City_Slider 2,716]

I´m still reading... and i sure dont have a clue, what you are talking about. But it´s interisting :-D

[mattb325 28,880]

On 7/7/2021 at 4:10 AM, Raymond7cn said:

Since @mattb325 has taught me about Sun Direction and pitch, so at the beginning, I made some tests with Shadow Texture ID, I missed its description (Flora's Shadow) yesterday where says:

In short, I think this texture doesn't take effect by Maxis, I deleted it, offset or editted some hex values, changed the color, modified other properties, however whatever I did, I couldn't see any difference there. weird!

That one, as far as I recall, is used: with growable flora - if you plant the $3 single maxis pine/maple/oak it starts as a small tree with a small shadow, but the as tree grows, the tiny shadow stays the same!

By the way, love the shape of the dune brush!